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THE standoff at the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) between the
Lopez-led management and state-run Government Service Insurance
Service (GSIS) will probably draw to a close this Tuesday, ending
what has been an acrimonious word war between the two insider groups
at the Philippines’ largest electricity distributor.
But after the dust settles, will Meralco
customers, representing more than half of the country’s
electricity market, be better off?
As has become apparent in the drawn-out
histrionics attending this issue, the matter may be safely defined
as a battle to lay claim to the country’s biggest monopoly profits
and all the benefits that go with this position.
On the one hand is the Lopez group, which owns
at least 33 percent of Meralco and has led the utility for about
three quarters of a century, excluding the two decades when the
government wrested control under the Martial Law regime.
On the other hand is GSIS, which is expected to
rally around its cause fellow state-run financial institutions,
namely the Home Development Mutual Fund, the Philippine Health
Insurance System, and the Social Security System—all of which hold
another third of the shares in the utility.
Provided these entities do GSIS’ bidding, and,
as some pundits claim, allow Malacañang to take over the
distributor, then this would be the second time in its history that
control over the utility would be snatched from the private sector.
The first, as mentioned above, was during the Martial Law regime,
when the dictatorship used national security as the pretext for
neutralizing the Lopezes, who had become Marcos critics.
It would seem then that history is repeating
itself, for Malacañang again is faced with a Lopez family whose
patriarch is highly critical of the Palace. But as a dead white
philosopher once said, history happens twice: the first as tragedy,
and the second as farce, which is how this whole Meralco affair is
turning out.
A farce because the vaunted Lopez empire is but
a shadow of its pre-Martial Law stature. Then President Marcos’
harangue against the Lopezes and the rest of the elite, would sound
hollow when deployed now by the Palace’s present occupant, as the
current political complexion has changed.
Furthermore, Meralco exists under a totally
different regulatory setup, especially after the Electric Power
Industry Reform Act of 2001 (Epira) restructured the sector, opening
competition in areas that previously were the domain of the few like
the Lopezes.
Moreover, the Palace’s purported Trojan horse,
the GSIS president, wields the banner of a wronged shareholder, at
the same time that his actions are hurting the very thing that
shareholders hold dear—Meralco’s stock price, which has fallen
sharply since the pension fund’s chief executive began his
anti-Lopez crusade.
This schizophrenia becomes very obvious whenever
the GSIS chief claims he is taking the cudgels of Meralco’s
customers, who have suffered untold iniquities from the excess
charges the utility has been inflicting upon them. A rational
Meralco shareholder would lift no finger to alter a situation that
has redounded to his benefit. So the question remains, why has the
GSIS chief endured this self-flagellation at the expense of the
pension fund’s members, who ultimately would have to bear the
losses of a falling Meralco stock price?
Having said the above, we don’t condone the
status quo either, in which Meralco appears to have been passing on
to its customers every charge imaginable, thus causing their
electricity bills to shoot up. Its customers have long felt that the
utility has been, in the words of a senator, fleecing them. Nothing
new there.
But as we said before in this column, something
is terribly amiss in this word war. We only wish Meralco’s
independent shareholders—those whom each side is courting—would
look not only at their private interests, but also consider the
social bottom line.
We hope that a Malacañang-appointed body
looking into this sad state of affairs would come up with real
solutions. Likewise, we look forward to the legislature’s review
of the Epira, with a view to introducing amendments that would
remove the patently anti-consumer provisions of the law.
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